Churchill Arrives in Moscow and Counter-attack in Stalingrad

ブッシュ批判のＴシャツを着ているだけで、搭乗を拒否されるご時世だが、Novena SquareにすごいＴシャツを着た普通のおじさんがいた。胸のデザインはヒトラーがナチスの敬礼をしているものだった。歴史感覚がまったく欠落しているのか、無知なのか、それとも無恥なのか。めっちゃ驚いた。東條英機や山下奉文のＴシャツで歩いていたら、どんな反応があるか、想像するまでもない。毎年８月になると、新聞が占領期の日本軍による蛮行を、ときには第三帝国のそれと同列視して非難する投書を掲載しながら、その一方で旭日旗デザインのファッションに知らん顔するのも同様の感覚だろう。

住吉会が幹部射殺に対して山口組に報復の銃撃を行っていた件で、朝日新聞は双方から警視庁に和解したと「電話で連絡があったという」と報じている。また産経新聞は、同庁に「和解の報告が来たという」としている。暴力団が警察に「和解しました」って電話で連絡してくるんだ……。連絡を受けた人が「わざわざご連絡いただいて、ありがとうございます」と言ったかどうか知りたいところ。警察と暴力団という、正反対に対立していながら、密接な関係を維持している不思議さが垣間見える。

米国産のジャポニカ米「松鶴」を見るたびに頭に浮かぶのは６代目笑福亭松鶴。Kalamazooでは、「国寶ローズ」っていうのがあったな。炊飯器なんか持ってなかったから、普通のなべでご飯を炊いていた。気持ちのいい気候で、陽のまだ沈まない夕方に寮のキッチンで夕食作り。同室だったハッサンが「サフランライスを食ってみろ」と言って、分けてくれたり。まだ明るい夜８時ごろにバレーボールを楽しんだり。

チャーチル、モスクワでスターリンと会談

Churchill decided to declare the bad news first: no Second Front that year. Stalin, faced with a fight for his life on the Volga, reacted sarcastically:
‘You can’t win wars without taking risks,’ he said and later: ‘You mustn’t be so afraid of the Germans.’ … Churchill revealed that the British and Americans were about to launch Operation Torch to seize North Africa…. In an impressive demonstration of his geopolitical instincts, Stalin immediately rattled off the reasons that this operation made sense….
At eleven (13 August), Stalin and Molotov… received Churchill in the Little Corner where the Vozhd handed his guest a memorandum attacking the West for not launching a Second Front, and again mocked British cowardice.
… Stalin’s insult infuriated Churchill…
Churchill awoke as sulky as ‘a spoilt child’ according to (British Ambassador) Clark Kerr who arrived at the dacha to discover that ‘the PM had decided to pack up and go.’…
‘This man has insulted me,’ retorted Churchill (to Kerr). ‘From now on, he can fight his battle alone.’ Finally he stopped: ‘Well, and what do you want me to do?’
Within the hour, Churchill’s entourage was calling the Kremlin to ask for a tête-à-tête with Stalin. The only response was that ‘Stalin was out walking’… … at 4.30 a.m. that morning, the German Sixth Army had attacked and smashed the Fourth Tank Army in the loop of the Don River, a more immediate crisis than a pinguid Englishman…
At 6 p.m., Stalin agreed to meet. Churchill bade Stalin goodbye in the Little Corner: When he was about to leave, Stalin ‘seemed embarrassed’ and then asked when they would meet again: ‘Why don’t you come to my house and have a little drink?’
‘I replied,’ wrote Churchill, ‘that I was in principle always in favour of such a policy.’… Stalin brought the conversation round to daughters. Churchill said his daughter Sarah was a redhead. So is mine, said Stalin who had his cue: he asked the housekeeper to get Svetlana.
‘Have the stresses of this war been as bad to you personally as carrying through the policy of collective farms,’ Churchill asked.
‘Oh no,’ replied Stalin revealingly. That had been ‘a terrible struggle’.
Churchill invited Stalin to London and the Vozhd recalled his visit in 1907 with Lenin, Gorky and Trotsky….
‘… Stalin had been splendid… What a pleasure it was to work with “that great man”’…. It was already dawn; the alliance was saved…. (pp. 369-373)

… at 11.30 p.m., he arrived at the office to face the deteriorating crisis in the North Caucasus where the Germans were approaching Ordzhonikidze and Grozny….
As the Germans pushed southwards, Stalin feared the Transcaucasus Front would collapse, yielding the oilfields, possibly bringing Turkey into the war, and tempting the restless Caucasian peoples to rebel. Four days after Churchill’s departure, Stalin turned to Beria:
‘Lavrenti Pavlovich,’ he respectfully addressed him. ‘Take with you whoever you like and all the armaments you think necessary, but please stop the Germans.’… The generals were contemplating a strategic abandonment of Ordzhonikidze but on the 22nd, Beria… arrived there to terrorize the Transcaucasus commanders. [Candide] Charkviani, the Georgian boss, was in the room when Beria ‘peered coldly round the table with a piercing stare’ and told them:
‘I’ll bread your back if you mention a word of this retreat again. You WILL defend the town!’… … the generals, all writing after [Beria’s] downfall, complained that his progress along the front was simply ‘showiness and noise’ which seriously disrupted their work.
Beria also had to destroy any oil that might fall into Nazi hands. Back in Moscow, Stalin summoned Nikolai Baibakov… Deputy Commissar of Oil Production, to his office. He was alone:
‘Comrade Baibakov… you’re responsible on the pain of losing your head for ensuring no oil is left behind.’ But he would also ‘lose his head’ if he DID destroy the oil too early. As he left, with his head spinning, Stalin added: ‘Do you know that Hitler has declared that without oil, he’ll lose the war?’
Beria’s other mission was to stamp out the embers of treason among the ethnic groups in the North Caucasus…. As a Georgian Mingrel brought up among non-Georgian Abkhazians, Beria possessed all the prejudices of one tiny Caucasian people to another. The Georgians had always been particularly suspicious of Moslem peoples like the Chechens: in Grozny, Beria investigated the reports that some Chechens had greeted the Germans with open arms.
… Stalingrad was indeed about to become the battle of battles, the focus of the world. (pp. 374-376)

スターリングラードの攻防

The Germans attacked by land and devastated Stalin’s city from the sky, destroying that industrial leviathan in an infernal bombardment that converted its stark Stalinist factories into a primeval landscape of caves and canyons….
The gravity of Stalingrad finally concentrated Stalin’s mind and brought about a revolution in his conduct of the war. Now he realized that the road to survival and glory lay with professional generals instead of his own impatient amateurism and his bungling cavalrymen. On 27 August, he ordered Zhukov to rush to Stalingrad and promoted him to Deputy Supreme Commander. Zhukov refused the promotion.
Zhukov met up with [Alexander] Vasilevsky in Stalingrad where he found the Germans creeping into the city. Stalin demanded counter-attacks but his forces were not yet up to it.
… The Germans had almost taken the city but one force stood in their way: the 62nd Army under General Vasily Chuikov… clung on to the Volga’s west bank….
… Chuikov’s direct commanders were General Andrei Yeremenko and Commissar Khrushchev, now back in favour, but it was too much important to be left to them. Stalin himself supervised the front with Zhukov and Vasilevsky in active command while Malenkov acted as his personal spy….
On 12 September, the rival commanders of Stalingrad flew simultaneously to see their respective Supremos with a neat dictatorial symmetry…. As Hitler ordered von Paulus to ‘capture as quickly as possible the whole of Stalingrad’, Zhukov and Malenkov… presented a report for Stalin proposing further offensive ‘to grind down the enemy… and simultaneously to prepare… a more powerful blow’. But what? Stalin looked at his own map and studied it quietly, ignoring the soldiers for a long moment, lost in his thoughts.
At 10 p.m. on 13 September, Stalin welcomed Zhukov and Vasilevsky to his study with an unusual gesture – a handshake….
… They handed over their map which showed their basic plan to launch a massive offensive against the German flanks, held by the weaker Romanian forces, smashing into their rear and linking up to encircle them: Operation Uranus. Just at this moment, the German attack, ordered by Hitler at Vinnitsa earlier that day, descended on the embattled 62nd Army…. Sending both generals straight back to Stalingrad to reconnoitre Uranus, Stalin said portentously:
‘No one else knows what we three discussed here. No one beyond the three of us is to know about it for the time being.’
The two messianic tyrants almost simultaneously prepared their peoples for victory. ‘There will be a holiday on our street too,’ Stalin hinted in his 7 November speech. The next day, Hitler boasted to his people:
‘I wanted to reach the Volga… at a particular city. By chance it bore the name of Stalin himself… I wanted to capture it and… we have as good as got it!’
… on the 11th he was worrying that he did not have enough aircraft. On the 13th, as von Paulus launched a last attempt to dislodge Chuikov, now holding a ruined splinter of territory only fifty yards deep, Zhukov and Vasilevsky flew into Moscow for a final briefing….
On the 18th, Stalin, accompanied by Beria, Molotov, Malenkov, and Zhukov, who remained to command Operation Mars before Moscow, worked in the Little Corner until 11.50 p.m. Three hours before the attack, the three fronts facing Stalingrad, under Generals Yeremenko, [Konstantin] Rokossovsky and [N.F.] Vatutin, were informed they were to attack imminently…. At 7.20 on the misty morning of 19 November, the 3,500 guns on the northern sector opened up. When the Jupiterian thunderclap was unleashed, the earth shook thirty miles away. A million men, 13,541 guns, 1,400 tanks and 1,115 planes, smashed into Hitler’s forces. (pp. 374-381)

ここ数日で「ガセネッタ＆シモネッタ」と「魔女の１ダース」を読んだ。３年以上前に一時帰国したときに読んでいたものだが、最近ロシアに偏向しており、もう一度読む気になった。「ガセネッタ＆シモネッタ」は、こっちに戻ってきてからＣＣで続きを読んでいた。タイトルを見たふじたさんが、「おまえ、何ちゅう本、読んでんねん」と言うので、米原万里さんのことを説明した。「まともな内容の本ですよ」と言うと、「そうか、今後貸してくれ」。結局、読んでもらう機会はなかった。ごめんね、おじさん。